Frontier Search Hijacking

From Payne.org Wiki

NOTE: As of ~May, 2011, Frontier has (as best I can tell) stopped all hiijacking and proxying of Google search queries. Use this tool from Berkeley to audit your connection.

I noticed this behavior recently when visiting relatives in West Virginia. My Google searches for "amazon" (from the Safari search bar) were landing on Amazon's home page directly, NOT showing a Google search results page as I expected.

ISPs have redirected DNS queries for a while, but have mostly focused on typos and misspellings. I've never seen an example of an ISP actually hijacking a user's Google search, and inserting their own results, and that seems pretty egregious to me.

NOTE: I contacted Frontier Communications and I heard back immediately from Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO. She said that this had been done by one of their vendors, in violation of Frontier's business rules, and it's been shut down. In subsequent discussions with folks at Frontier, they seem to be still proxying Google queries (without hiijacking) by directing www.google.com to their own servers, but are re-evaluating this practice as well (as of April, 2011).

The net result: a user Googling "amazon" would normally see a Google results page. Instead, Fronter subscribers (while this hijacking was in place) would instead get the Amazon home page, with Frontier's affiliate code inserted (presumably in an attempt to get commission payments from Amazon).